MarPrilWriMo

Over at her blog, Casey recently stated that she was starting a new novel. Well, I also happen to be on the fringes of a budding project, and have been wanting to crank out one of those really fun awful first drafts.

So what did we do, you ask? To which I wittily answer: MarPrilWriMo.

I'm sure most of you have heard of NaNoWriMo before. You know, write a novel (or at least 50k of one) in a month. We're not going to be quite as intense (shooting for 30k, which averages out to a grand a day), but it still will be a fun, commiserating, one-person-pushes-the-other-until-everyone's-achieving-more-than-they-would-have-on-their-own kinda way to pound out those pages.

If anyone ELSE cares to join in on the fun (not to mention, it'd be almost a third of that 100k we're all shooting for by year's end knocked out), we're starting tomorrow, March 9th and running through April 9th. Midnight to Midnight, I suppose, if you want to be all official about it. We could even potentially schedule some word wars and think up some dares such to make it really feel like nanowrimo. Join us. It'll be fun, I promise.

And see you on the MarPrilWriMo front!

1,000,000 Words: A Challenge

I was reading my parents' Bottom Line Personal magazine yesterday, and there was a small article about how mastering most anything takes about 10,000 hours of practice and doing before the brain cognitively assimilates the task. This article made me remember something I've read in a couple places in the past few years regarding this topic and writing: Some universal wisdom in the fiction writing world apparently got together and decided that the one million word mark is the point at which one finally masters his or her craft. Now, one million words is an awful lot. It's a little less than the entire Harry Potter series, which took Ms. Rowling a decade to write (granted she probably wrote a lot more than a million words in the process).

But you've got to start in pieces. So I'm posing two things: a question and a challenge.

First, how many words of fiction do you think you've written so far, in your lifetime? Just a rough estimate. I'd guess I'm probably right around 110,000.

Second, I challenge you to add at least 100,000 words to your total before the year is out. Counting today, there are exactly 300 days left in 2009, which leaves only a little over 300 words a day on average. That's only a page in Times New Roman font. That would put me personally over 200k, and I'd be pretty stoked with that. One fifth of the way towards mastery.

Anyone up for the challenge?